Domestic violence has occurred across cultures and time and remains a contemporary problem. It would be difficult to imagine any forensic clinician who has not had to contend with a dilemma involving risks to a child or an adult in an intimate relationship marred by violence. The statistics cited in Assessing Dangerousness: Violence by Batterers and Child Abusers reflect the stark fact that domestic violence is commonplace. Nearly half a million female victims of domestic violence seek treatment for injuries each year in the United States, more than for any other cause of injury. Each year, approximately 3 million child maltreatment referrals are made to social service agencies in the United States.
Although the book's editor, Jacquelyn C. Campbell, is well known in the field of domestic violence, I suspect that the use of the term dangerousness in the title may be off-putting to some forensic clinicians for whom it may seem slightly anachronistic. Forensic clinicians who are steeped in the current terminology of violence risk assessment and averse to using the global terminology of dangerousness might be stopped from picking up this book. That would be a mistake. This concise and clinically oriented book neatly fills a niche in the range of information that all clinicians need. The approach adopted in this book seems specifically designed with the forensic clinician in mind. In the preface, Campbell sets out the laudable goal of incorporating research information in a user-friendly language and approach. In my view, this goal is amply met.
The book is laid out in seven chapters: an introduction to the prediction of interpersonal violence (Chapter 1), a discussion of prediction challenges for practitioners (Chapter 2), evaluation of perpetrators of physical child abuse (Chapter 3), evaluation of risk factors for fatal child abuse (Chapter 4), prediction of homicide of and by battered women (Chapter 5), an approach to assessing the risk of intimate partner violence (Chapter 6), and a review of a multi-site case-control study examining risk factors for femicide-suicide in abusive relationships (Chapter 7).
This is a short book with succinct chapters. Despite multiple contributors, the language and tone are generally quite even and accessible. Each chapter is helpfully prefaced by an executive summary in a table of contents format that permits the reader to locate and go directly to the information sought.
An appealing aspect of this book is an explicitly clinical orientation in the presentation of information. Chapter 2, “Prediction Issues for Practitioners,” helpfully sets out the legal, ethics-related, and statistical concerns that arise in making clinical predictions of risk of violence and addresses the points that should be considered when using a risk assessment instrument as part of an evaluation. The remainder of the chapters examine specific research relevant to different types of domestic violence risk. The chapters examining the most severe forms of domestic violence, fatal child abuse, and homicide contain information that would be difficult to find summarized elsewhere. Brevity is a strength of these chapters. The summaries of the research are brief but contain the relevant data that one needs to keep in mind in clinical encounters. The exception is chapter 7, which is a bit challenging to digest, as it is laid out in the format of a research paper rather than the clinically oriented summaries that were adopted in the rest of the book.
The appropriate caveats on the use of information for clinical purposes are present throughout the chapters. For example, the barriers encountered when examining research involving low-base-rate events such as fatal child abuse and homicide of and by battered women are highlighted. Despite these obstacles, the authors appear to have made a specific effort to describe available research findings in a manner that is clinically useful. For example, Chapter 6 on assessing risk of intimate partner violence differentiates and presents research findings from different risk scenarios: risk of assault in previously nonviolent couples, risk of repeated assault among wife abusers, and prediction of whether another assault will occur after treatment intervention.
Several risk assessment instruments that may be helpful in assessing domestic violence and the criteria by which to judge them are presented, including The Danger Assessment (Chapter 6), used to predict the risk of homicide in battered women, and the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment Instrument or ODARA (Chapter 6), used to determine the risk of wife assault.
In summary, I recommend this book to any forensic clinician who is looking for an update on research in the area of domestic violence. It can be read in a few evenings, and the time would be well invested for both a seasoned forensic clinician to confirm and reinforce his knowledge base in the area and for a novice forensic clinician who needs a basic primer. The reader will gain knowledge about key risk considerations and assessment instruments that may help when faced with difficult assessment questions in domestic violence situations.
Footnotes
Disclosures of financial or other potential conflicts of interest: None.
- © 2012 American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
